I spent time tonight with blank ledger lines for the first time in eons, wrestled with lyrics to a second verse, and made significant progress (for me). It feels good. Now I must stop because I need to tackle a commission before completely losing steam, but I am giddy enough to share that progress has been made!

This is especially good because last night when I had set aside time to delve into my novel for the first time in ages as well, my teething daughter made that an impossibility. So getting to touch my piano tonight and tap into creativity in a way I haven’t in a long time soothed my wounded creative from last night.

My hope is to do a little time five days a week working on my own compositions, then have one day to sing from my collection to help build my voice back up again, and one day to play the flute a week. I know life will get in the way of that, but with set days to work on certain things, I’ll at least get a couple of hours in each week, which is loads more than I’ve been getting.

Last night, while sitting in the dark with my laptop monitor screened turned low on my bed while my daughter lay next to me tossing and turning due to teething and getting over the cold we shared earlier in the week, I spent a solid chunk of time focusing myself for my next projects to be released here.

Writing – I’ve decided my next poetry collection will be one of love poems, and I’ve narrowed down my choices last night. I will narrow those down further and finalize my selection in the next week or so, and then start roughs for illustrations. I need to decide if I want to make the book more expensive and do colored pages or not. I know the illustrated poetry collection to come after this will definitely need to be in color and possibly hardcover if I make the illustrations nice enough, so it’s something for me to think about. But yes, the future poetry collection will be where some of my new work will be aiming to land in, and of the ones I’ve shared here, Little Boy Blue will find a home.

I have two bigger writing projects I want to work on in 2018, a novel and a theatrical piece, as well as finally maybe moving forward on my graphic novel, but I still need to decide what is going to be my priority and how best to balance my currently limited writing time. I would love to be able to release both the poetry collection and my first novel by the end of 2018 and get my theatrical piece produced and my third poetry collection and graphic novel out by 2019, but I am not holding myself to any set schedule as of yet because my life is my life, with no set routine in place, and my kids always come first. But those are my big audacious goals. It would be lovely to settle into a rhythm of publishing one novel and one collection of poems and/or short stories a year. I think it can be done eventually. But maybe not until my kids are way more self-sufficient!

Music – I spent a long time going through all the songs I have ever written, half-written, written lyrics for, made notes about, etc. I discarded some real stinkers! I probably kept some stinkers too because they are still a little “precious” to me, but what can you do? Of the songs I’ve kept, I’ve tentatively separated into two potential “albums”, and my focus for the immediate future musically is to really hone every song on the first album and get it all on paper, get honest feedback on them, then hone some more and decide what I want to do with them all.

Tomorrow I hope to spend some time really focusing on art planning. Aside from the illustrations for the next poetry collection, I’ve been holding off on delving into BIG pieces for years. I had in mind years ago a plan to do a series of Dangerous Women portraits, made of women of history and fiction and myth and religions who shook the status quo, but I’d also like to dip my toes back into fantasy paintings and illustrations, and I get a lot out of the abstracts I’ve done too. But too much debating in my mind about it will continue to make me not produce anything, so this weekend is my “make up my mind” time. Honestly, a big chunk of it will probably depend on what decent art supplies we have left after we chuck what has become unusable over the years! I think I’m going to ask for some new paint sets for the holidays and see what I get.

Anyway, I’m feeling very good. Tired, still, as only a parent of a teething baby can be, worried about the state of the world and humanity as always, but good. Despite the chaotic nature of our current reality, I can create. And I can share what I create as I want to do so. And that is very good.

This past week, while waiting for people and on mini breaks at work, I read through my blog from the very beginning, way back in 2012. It was an interesting trip back for me. Eye opening, and very helpful in finally honing in on the next direction of my life.

The first few years of doing this blog focused a lot on writing as that was what I was prepping for release into the world. I also kept talking about music and art projects that I wanted to tackle. And I really miss having projects that I am passionate about. I miss all parts of that process.

I also posted my dream schedule of balancing parenting with being a freelance creator, and I am so far from that dream at the moment, it is laughable. Working full time (plus) in theater left me with barely any other creative time, let alone quality parenting time, and while the job was fulfilling in different ways before the leadership shift and it gave me the stability to get a mortgage and health insurance to have my 2nd child, I was so much happier when I was only working part time for them. Then going back into a different full time position doing bridal alterations has been draining in a very different way, and because of the hours the shop is open, even though I am physically working less hours, I still feel like I never get to see my kids or create anything extra. Especially since I’m still self-healing from last year. I feel all this pent up creative force longing to burst forth though.

So, the goal for the past couple of months now has been to be freelancing by the end of the year and becoming the at-home parent. Once that happens, I will still do some alterations. I will do some costuming work too as it comes up and as I can find time to do it. But I want to focus the bulk of my energies on my kids and on creating my own work again. I need to feel that passion for creating that I get sucked out of me by scraping myself dry through overwork.

I wrote the following and it was super cathartic to do, but I think I would describe it more as a “piece” rather than a “poem” due to the discordant rhythm and the dialogue involved, but that suits the mood. Hopefully this means my streak has been broken. We’ll have to see.

Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam

Lady Liberty weeps
In the corner on the floor,
Torch extinguished.
Uncle Sam says
“Smile! Don’t you know
You are so much
Prettier
When you smile?
I can’t abide
Your ugliness.”
“Oh Sammy,” Liberty wails,
“Your games have gone
Too far,
And I feel such pain
That smiling is an
Impossibility.”
“You’re too temperamental,”
Uncle Sam replies.
“You let your
Emotions
Get the best of you.
Swallow it down, like me,
Until you are
Numb inside.”
Standing, Liberty shouts.
“No, I won’t allow myself
To become internally
Dead.
Nor will I hide
From the truth.
You have done terrible things,
And my name no longer means
What it did.
Payment is coming due, Sammy,
And I fear it has all been for nought.”
Uncle Sam snaps
And knocks Lady Liberty
To the ground.
“You’re a bitch and a whore.
How dare you question
My authority?
I know better than you
The way to control
These masses.
Fear and pain
Are tools of the trade.
Get used to it.”
He looks at her and laughs.
“You may be stupid,
But I’ll keep you around,
As long as you’re leashed.
I like that you
Do my feeling
For me.”
Lady Liberty rises once again
And lights her torch anew.
Calmly, gently, she sets
Uncle Sam ablaze.
“There are times,”
She muses to herself,
“That you just need to
Start over.”

I apologize for my lack of posts in the past couple of weeks, but life has gotten crazy recently. But now I’m back and hopefully will have a few months of regular updates until things get crazy again. We’ll see.

A couple of weeks ago, I was given some free furniture from my aunt who is upgrading, and it included a couple of bookshelves, which when added to the bookshelf we bought from a friend moving last summer, allowed us to finally unpack all of our books and CDs, which was about ten boxes. And this is after we’d weeded through and removed several boxes to pass on and donate. So yes, we’re crazy about books. For me, I really do like to re-read series, and there are some series I’ve revisited so many times in my life, so it was like unpacking old friends. I still had several books I had saved from my youth that I put up in my son’s room, as we started reading chapter books together (a chapter a night, plus two picture books before bed – his first chapter book was The Little Prince). I’m excited to share the books I loved with him, and also it is definitely intentional that I am reading books with both male and female protagonists. I want him to love stories about every body.

Anyway, my big mother’s day gift that I asked for, since we’re still recovering financially, was time to alphabetize the books. So I did that. It’s the first time all of our books are together and organized since 2011. And 2010-2011 was the first time we ever had our full collection together in one spot. So it feels good. Because I’m a dork, I wanted to start reading through the shelf, reading one book in between two works on my Kindle (which is generally heavier works or indie books or whatever I can get for free that sounds interesting) but couldn’t decide if I wanted to start at the beginning or the end, so my husband suggested doing a random letter generator and I got ‘R’. So I just finished a short story collection of Kim Stanley Robinson called The Planet on the Table which I had never read. It was good. Really deep. There was one particular story that was a “what-if” about American WWII military involved in dropping the atomic bombs in Japan that dealt heavily with the notion of personal responsibility. It’s an important question to ask – who holds more responsibility? Who has more blood on their hands? The person giving the orders or the person pushing the button/pulling the trigger? To say “I was just following orders” does not erase culpability. Ever. But which carries the bigger burden?

I don’t get to read as much as I did when the baby was nursing more, but I still manage 10-20 minutes a day usually. Sometimes a little more. So now that the short story collection is done, I’m going back to the two I was flipping back and forth on the Kindle – a book on Qigong energy which I’ve been reading in segments and incorporating bits of what I’m learning into my little time for meditation I still manage to squeeze in during the week and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, volume 1 of 3 volumes, which is super long and intense but really good. I got up to a section on art that I’m going to do a post about eventually, but I don’t know how to cut down the section in the book. I’m about halfway through both of those, and then when I finish them, I’ll move on to re-reading the Harry Potter series, which I haven’t touched since I was given the 7th book when it first came out. So that will be a fun palate cleanser in between the heavier works I’m tackling.

So yeah, I’m a lifelong learner and I love exploring topics deeply, but I also enjoy disappearing into a good work of fiction. I’m glad that I am going to try to balance both moving forward. It may help inspire me to start writing fiction again.

My gallery is up on my Art page here. Nothing fancy, just the freebie slideshow that comes with the page. But it’s cool to see all my work on one page! And I really like seeing my two abstracts together. It makes me want to do more. Now to start submitting to some local shows.

In other creative news, I’m working on another pencil sketch as a gift that I will post once it is received. I had wanted to finish it last week and it sits still barely started. But I hope to finish it all tonight, if I finish my work for the shop in time. Writing-wise, I’m still tinkering with a poem. Four more lines to go! I’m doing it in strict rhyming 8 syllable lines, and it is tackling some very serious societal issues, so it’s difficult. It is going to wind up feeling heavy and preachy, rather like an 19th century poem read out at a lecture series, but that was kind of what I am going for. I find it fascinating to consider that sometimes poems just pour out of me, like Little Boy Blue – I felt this huge weight on me after watching some atrocity online and the poem just popped out. And then there’s this one I’ve been working on for a very long time because I don’t want to force it. And musically, I’ve been playing and singing a little bit multiple times a week. Still haven’t gotten into a good practice with my flute yet but at least I’ve gotten it out a few times.

Since I’m easing into my new full-time position, I’m transitioning into an all new schedule again, which means being flexible about my time. My kids’ needs for me come first while we’re all adapting.

I have begun the work on refilling my creative well, which is the last part of me that really needs healing. Physically and mentally, I’m back to my former self. So yay for that!

Earlier this week, I started a new abstract painting with no plan in mind, just letting myself play with the paint. It will be interesting to see what happens with it. I love doing that, but I also have a really difficult time knowing when I’m done with a painting when it’s not of a particular subject matter.

Musically, I’ve begun playing the piano and singing a lot more. My baby loves to either sit in her little toy chair next to me or right on my lap while I play, so that’s been a huge boon in the process. I found the box that held my personal songs that I’ve been working on and plan on cracking into that today. That same box also held all of my flute music, so I will be bringing that out for the first time since we moved hopefully this weekend. Baby steps. I’ve also begun listening to more music again, mostly jazz and classical around my daughter to foster brain development for her, and I’ve found having it on in the background is helping my brain too.

Writing-wise, I’m still primarily just posting here and little snippets on my personal page (mostly political and social stuff there mixed with personal) and getting back on track with morning pages. I haven’t been able to journal at night with the baby’s schedule, and I am having a difficult time writing fiction. I think playing music is helping me get back in touch with the writing, and I may focus on writing poems and songs and “pieces” for a while before delving back into fiction.

And before I can really develop a plan for where I want to focus my creative energies moving forward, I have to figure out the survival part of things. Which I have definite possibilities that will hopefully be firmed up soon.

In some ways, with everything going on in the world, it seems crazy to be focusing on this stuff, but at the end of everything, it’s the creative spark we all share that will let us evolve as a species.

I used to be a voracious reader. A couple of years ago, I noticed that I wasn’t reading as much as I had in the past. It started in grad school, then working crazy hours, becoming a mother, trying to create… somehow, there wasn’t much time left for reading. When I noticed I was reading less, I made an effort to read for at least 10-15 minutes every day, and very rarely missed, and now one of the nice things about having a nursing baby, though, is that I have a lot more time to read in short chunks. And I’ve been trying to read a wide variety of books. I’ll always love fiction, but I’ve been really alternating between fiction and non-fiction, old books I’ll get off of the Project Gutenberg site (and as soon as I have a more stable income again, I intend to donate) and new books from authors that I “meet” online… everything that might expand my mind and make me think.

I had two books that helped me a lot leading up to my losing my job and in the aftermath that followed.

The first is Coffee for Consciousness by Vito Mucci. This is one of those times that soft marketing techniques worked. Vito and I were in a Facebook group together and I had liked some of the excerpts and memes he had posted and made a few comments, he friended me, and I’ve enjoyed his life views for a long time before purchasing the book. Going through the stress I was, reading this book when I did was perfect. It has a very conversational tone to it, which I enjoyed because it really feels like you’re just sitting down and having a conversation about life and the way humans and the universe work. The book just gave me some really strong reminders about how to look at the situation I was finding myself in, and also some new perspectives that really helped me to face my “big meeting” with the strength and conviction in myself that I deserved to give myself.

The second is Arthur Schopenhaur’s On the Basis of Morality, which you can find for free from many sites online. I chose to read it as a follow up to my tackling Kant a while back, and I was actually chuckling out loud at moments while reading, which I did not expect from a 19th century essay on ethics. And reading the response of the committee at the end (because he wrote the essay to enter it into a contest) was priceless. Even if you don’t have the same sense of humor that I do, though, it is an incredibly worthwhile read because of the argument for morality being based on compassion and for his views on ego and self-will. It gave me so much to think about about humanity as a collective group that I was able to not think about myself and my problems. And in turn, I have the feeling that my writing is going to taking a deeper look into things, which is cool.